Scammers are using fake articles to convince Australians to put money into fraudulent investment platforms.
Some victims have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to the industrial-scale operation, which spends big on Facebook ads to reach potential targets.
Here is how the scam works, as well as some clues about who is behind it.
The scam starts with an ad on Facebook.
It paints a picture of a dramatic “on-air revelation”, using an AI-generated image of Australian celebrities facing off.
There are dozens of ads just like this one, often involving senior ABC reporters and popular politicians.
Clicking on one will take you to the centrepiece of the scam: an almost perfect clone of the ABC News website.
All the trimmings of the website are pixel-perfect, all the way down to the iview and Listen tabs.
Each variation on the fake story will describe a scene where a public figure is caught hiding a “secret approach” to investing.
They use AI-generated photos, often made to look like they’re taken from behind the scenes on a TV set.
In one of them, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has his personal bank details displayed by hackers while appearing on Insiders.
In another, he is confronted by Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie for talking down to everyday people.
The articles all use the kind of punchy language that is characteristic of generative AI.
“Lambie’s fist hit the desk so hard the water glasses shook,” one article says.
The short sentences and dramatic scenes all come with a peppering of genuine facts, like that Mr Taylor was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
All of this drama is to set the groundwork for the entire point of the scam: spruiking a fraudulent investment platform.
This one is called Hexonic 365.
Near the bottom of the article, there’s an “Editor’s note” explaining that the platform has been purportedly investigated and found to be “legitimate” by the ABC’s reporters.
Do not be fooled; Hexonic 365 is a scam, designed to defraud you of your money.
Alongside the fake editor’s notes, there is a warning that time is running out for prospective investors.
This is a classic tactic used by scammers to encourage impulsive behaviour from their targets.
Click the Hexonix 365 link, and you’ll land on what looks like an investment platform.
Its marketing materials promise high returns, alongside testimonials from other Australian celebrities.
Fill out the form and the phone will start to ring. On the line will be a scammer, trying to steal as much of your money as they can.
The same scam is popping up in countries across the globe, with almost identical campaigns targeting Canada, the UK and many European nations.
It is being run on an industrial scale, using sophisticated online infrastructure, as part of a criminal ecosystem spanning Europe and Israel.
It is estimated to have stolen at least $350 million globally.
One Australian man told the ABC he lost over $500,000 to the scam. “My world ended as I knew it,” he said.
Another lost over $100,000 to an earlier iteration of the same scam back in 2024.
Key to the scammers’ success is their ability to reach potential targets.
We reliably found ads on Facebook linking to the fake ABC News site across April, May and June. Many of these ads remained active on Meta’s platforms for several days before being removed.
When one batch was taken down, another account took over and posted another suite of ads linking to the same fake articles.
Meta, which owns Facebook, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Catriona Lowe, deputy head of the ACCC, says that digital platforms are one of several sectors that need to cooperate to truly stamp out investment scams.
“We think that all of the platforms, including Meta, need to do more to protect their customers … from the dangers that are on their sites,” she says.
Scammers use sophisticated “cloaking” tactics to avoid detection by platforms like Facebook and Instagram, says Jerome Dangu, CTO of Confiant, a company that tracks malicious advertising across the internet.
“[These scammers are] abusing the legitimate ad industry,” says Mr Dangu, “and using it to funnel traffic to these scams.”
But that doesn’t mean that nothing can be done about it.
Meta profits from scam ads
Celebrities have been asking Facebook’s owner, Meta, to intervene, and stop their image being used for these scams for years.
“I’ve complained to Facebook and Instagram. They do absolutely nothing,” Dick Smith told ABC Media Watch in 2023.
Mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has been fighting Meta in the courts over deepfakes of him proliferating on the company’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
And yet these ads continue to proliferate.
Last year, a Reuters investigation uncovered one reason why this might be: Meta is earning a fortune from scam ads.
Documents from inside Meta reportedly showed the tech giant had projected that 10 per cent of its revenue in 2024 would come from “ads for scams and banned goods”.
On average, it was showing around 15 billion scam ads a day, the documents reportedly showed. That translated to about $US7 billion ($10 billion) in revenue in a single year.
This is money paid to Meta by the scammers themselves, who rely on Meta’s ads to reach the people they victimise.
The victims’ money is being spent on reaching further victims, and Meta is profiting from it.
Fake ABC scam run out of Israel and Eastern Europe
With digital forensics assistance from Qurium’s Tord Lundström, the ABC has identified more than 3,000 fake investment “brands” that were created by the scammer group.
Qurium provides technical support for digital investigations, collaborating with media outlets, including as part of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
When one brand is identified in a fraud alert or is blocked by internet providers, another seamlessly takes its place.
Just as Hexonix 365, for instance, is only used in fake articles with Australian content, and uses fake testimonials from Australian celebrities to promote it, each of the scammers’ brands targets a specific country.
Australia, Canada and several Western European nations are among the most heavily targeted.
Scammers generally avoid defrauding people in their own countries, probably because that means local law enforcement is less likely to come after them.
Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Israel had no investment brands targeting them, which lines up with other evidence linking the scam to these countries.
Some of the group’s test websites had the word “shablon” in the URL, which translates to “template” in Bulgarian, another piece of evidence suggesting that scammers are operating from the Eastern European country.
The money trail, which we will explore in a later story, leads to an international money-laundering network based in Israel.
Another Israeli operator working with the same group of scammers was recently convicted of laundering more than $10 million in a Sydney court.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) would not comment on whether it was investigating this group or any others in Europe or Israel.
An AFP spokesperson said it had “provided law enforcement assistance to five offshore scam centre investigations resulting in 560 arrests and the disruption of 15 scam centres” in Asia as part of “Operation Firestorm”.
